Karamjeet Paul. Managing Principal

With over 30 years of operating and advisory experience, our founder and Managing Principal, Karamjeet Paul, has worked with senior leadership teams to address complex strategic decisions under conditions of uncertainty—particularly where outcomes are shaped by risks that cannot be fully anticipated.

His perspective has been shaped by hands-on experience across global financial institutions, entrepreneurial ventures, and advisory engagements. He has served in executive roles, including CFO of Citicorp Investment Bank and CFO of Citicorp’s global Diners Club business, and was Secretary to Citicorp’s Finance Committee (CEO, CFO, Treasurer, and business heads). Across these roles, he has led initiatives spanning strategy, risk management, and the development of new business propositions.

 Mr. Paul is the author of  "Surviving Meltdowns That Cannot Be Prevented" (Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 2022) and "Managing Extreme Financial Risk: Strategies & Tactics for Going Concerns" (Academic Press/Elsevier in 2013). His work has also appeared in Forbes, American Banker/BankThink and Financial Times/Agenda.
 

Selected Contributions

Financial Risk and Strategic Frameworks

In the early 1980s, Mr. Paul pioneered the interest-rate gap management framework at Citicorp   

that became the foundation for modern interest-rate risk management across the financial services industry. This work enabled Citicorp’s Finance Committee to quantify extreme exposure, establish policy guidelines, and implement enterprise-wide balance sheet strategies.

Data-Driven Business Innovation

He also led the development of an early data-driven marketing business based on a proprietary database of consumer purchase behavior in supermarkets—an approach that anticipated the evolution of today’s digital and analytics-driven business models.

Entrepreneurial Leadership

In the 1990s, Mr. Paul founded and led a consumer healthcare information company. Under his leadership, the company built the largest consumer health database, a major consumer health publication, and multiple online information platforms. These assets supported the development of targeted, data-driven marketing services widely adopted by leading pharmaceutical companies.

Extreme Risk and Organizational Sustainability

More recently, his work has focused on extreme financial risk and organizational sustainability. He developed a “sustainability management” approach that defines and evaluates the extreme-exposure dimension of the risk spectrum—particularly risks arising from unanticipated events (“unknown unknowns”)—and provides a framework for maintaining viability under severe and uncertain conditions.

Strategy and Generative AI

Building on this foundation, Mr. Paul is now applying generative AI to strategic and analytical work.

His approach emphasizes the disciplined use of AI as a thinking tool—structuring analysis, surfacing assumptions, and improving decision-making under uncertainty. This includes applying AI to identify and evaluate both explicit and implicit assumptions underlying major investment and business strategy decisions, and to support scenario analysis and structured exploration of uncertainty.

Rather than using AI as a decision engine, the focus is on improving the quality of thinking that informs decisions.

Industry Experience

Mr. Paul’s operating and advisory experience spans multiple industries, including:

• Banking and financial services 
• Information and data services 
• Pharmaceutical marketing and consumer health information 
• Outsourcing and global services 
• Manufacturing and distribution 

Education

Mr. Paul is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and holds an MBA in Finance from Case Western Reserve University.

His work today sits at the intersection of strategy, uncertainty, and generative AI—focused on improving how organizations make high-stakes decisions.

Please contact us via email at KPaul@StratExpoGroup.com.